Architecture Strategy for Nokia

Will Nokia touch its original price?

Nokia's stock price is behaving wierdly. Market analysts predict that it will touch $24. Current stock price has fallen to $10. As a follower of this company, one wonders, what is the realistic outlook for this company and where does it need to improve from a software architecture perspective?

Nokia is the world's largest cellphone company. It releases mutiple models each year and sells millions of cellphones around the world in different markets.

However, off late it has been losing marketshare to more innovative competitors like Google and Apple. Google has launched its own version of the phone OS Android and Apple has built an eco-system of apps and music around its phone. Apple has already defined iself as a product design company and iPhone and the new iPad are no different.

Nokia on the other hand excels in making reliable cellphone handsets. Nokia should ideally now segment the market and decide which segments it focuses on.

From, the looks of it, Nokia segments its market as follows:
1. The mobile phone user
2. The Email user
3. Music lover
4. The Photo Buff
5. The Mobile Computer.

With each of the above, Nokia needs to think which way it sees the market go. Nokia can still play the role of the ideal converged device by offering something that comes close to the real and perceived needs of the customer. However, iPhone and Android sets a new baseline for the phones of the future in terms of a platform that others can build content for.

It is this partner ecosystem that Nokia needs more than hardware design. A platform that is open and not exclusive to certain channel partners. With a differentiated product line, Nokia will need to make sure that others can treat the Nokia hardware platforms that they themselves can provide differentiated products for. Nokia will also need to ensure that it allows networks and channel partners to package this variability as a differentiated product.

One of the likely problems has been that even though Nokia has very differentiated hardware platform, its operating system is antiquated and not highly differentiated. While differentiation exists at level of Series 40, 60 and so on, it is geared towards hardware capabilities rather than consumer segments. Maybe Nokia needs to think of an OS and SDK strategy that is built for gamers, music lovers, imaging enthusiasts and so on. Maemo would be an ideal foundation to start building that second tier SDK.